Question

I read this article, the parts of “Intellisense” and “Generated Code”:

http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html

Do you think the Author’s is right?

I don’t agree that Intellisense is soooo bad for programmers. VS for C# uses to “hide” the controls’ events in another file, but you can find them if you know enough about the language and you can modify them by hand. And with VS I don’t need to memorize all the .Net classes I use.
I think it doesn’t matter if you use an IDE or notepad but, if thsese RAD tools exist and are free… Why not to use them?

Answer 1

No I very much disagree with this point.

Yes, I do agree that intellisense allows me to keep less of an objects growing number of members in my head. I am dumber in the sense that I often know less about the intricate details of projects where I use intellisense heavily.

For instance, I can probably rattle off all of the members of the C++ types I use with great accuracy. I tend to be a VIM only guy for my C++ projects and hence don’t really use intellisnsee. In C# and VB.Net projects though I couldn’t rattle off the members with the same accuracy as I rely on intellisense more often.

But there is a trade off. Keeping all of the members in my head comes with a cost. When writing code, instead of focusing on the algorithm, I focus on the members. I have to constantly think about the naming convention of a particular type, or the parameter list, what’s byref or by val, when writing out an algorithm in C++. In C#/VB.Net I’m more free to think about the algorithm as the IDE takes care of finding the members for me.

Does this mean I’m dumber? No it simply means I’m able to focus on the problem I’m actually trying to solve. I feel this makes me more productive and hence smarter not dumber.